Earthly Possessions (17 page)

Then Linus would set the baby aside and the two of us would study my photo: some high school girl in Alberta’s sequined shawl, strung with loops of curtain-beads, holding a plume of peacock feathers and giving us a dazed, proud, beautiful smile, as if she knew how she had managed to astonish us.

In the fall of 1972, Alberta died. We got a telegram from her father-in-law.
YOUR MOTHER DEAD OF HEART FAILURE FUNERAL
10 A.M. WEDNESDAY
. When he read it, Saul turned grim but said nothing. Later he called Linus and Julian into the sunporch and they held a conference with the doors closed. I hung around outside, fiddling with strands of my hair. When it came to matters of importance, I thought, I was not remotely a part of that family. Here I assumed I had broken into their circle, found myself some niche in the shelter of Alberta’s shadow, but it turned out the Emorys were as shut away as ever and Alberta had gone and died. Underneath I had always expected her back, I believe. I wanted her approval; she was so much braver, freer, stronger than I had turned out to be. There were a thousand things I had planned on holding up for her to pass judgment on. Now it seemed that these things had no point any more, and I thought of them all—even the children—with a certain flat dislike.

I went to find my mother, who was knitting in front of the TV. “Alberta has died,” I told her.

“Oh, my soul,” said Mama, not missing a stitch. But then she never had thought much of her. “Well, I suppose the men will be going to the funeral.”

But they didn’t, as it happened. That was the subject of
the conference. Saul had told them
he
wasn’t going, and he didn’t think they should either, but that was up to them. They discussed it carefully, examining all the issues. This was what they’d come to: her gloriously wicked sons, now aging and balding and troubled by pathetic, minor errors. In her absence, their colors had faded. People are only reflections in other people’s eyes, it turns out. In Alberta’s absence her house had crumbled and vanished, her belongings had taken on a rusty smell. (She told me once that the Emorys had always been killed by horses; that was their mode of dying. But in her absence it emerged that only one had been: a distant uncle. The others had passed away in their beds, puny deaths they would have been spared if Alberta had only stayed around.)

Julian said he wouldn’t attend the funeral either. That left Linus, the only one who might have liked to go, but everybody knew that he wouldn’t defy his brothers. (Linus had a beard because he never had shaved, not ever, since the day his first whiskers grew in. That was how little he fought things.) “I’ll just stay at home and say a prayer for her in my mind,” he told Saul.

“Whatever you like,” Saul said.

It was Linus I heard this from, of course. Never Saul. Linus sat on a kitchen chair later, sanding a piece of wood the size of a postage stamp. For a couple of years now, he had been building dollhouse furniture. I don’t know why. And all of a sudden he said to me, “In my opinion, he should forgive her.”

“What?”

“Saul,” said Linus, “should forgive our mother.”

“Oh well, let him have
one
sin.”

“On the sunporch he said, ‘What makes me laugh is, that crazy old man outlived her after all.’ Grandpa, he meant. Then he really did laugh. Threw back his head and laughed out loud. What do you make of that?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I don’t even try. Leave him alone.”

So Linus blew a speck of sawdust away, and wiped his forehead with one veiny brown arm and fell silent. He was used to my protecting
him
, not Saul. He didn’t guess how often I had asked myself the same question: What do you make of Saul?

Saul had become a man of blacks and whites. In the pulpit, looming black robe with a wide white neckband; the rest of the time, cheap black suit and white shirt. Often, while buying groceries or walking with the children, I would catch sight of him striding through the town on some wild mission—larger than life, with his unbuttoned suit coat billowing out behind him, trouser cuffs flapping, tie fluttering, strings of neglected hair feathering over his collar. He carried a Bible, always, and wore a dark, intense expression, as if narrowing in on something. Most of the time, he didn’t even see us.

Was he just a fanatical preacher, bent on converting the world?

But sometimes when giving his sermons he stumbled and halted, and appeared to be considering the words he had just spoken. Then I would have to consider them myself, trying to discover what truth might lie within them. Sometimes, while lashing out against the same old evils, he would stop in midsentence and sag and shake his head and walk away, forgetting to say the benediction. Then his bewildered, ever smaller flock would rustle in their pews, and I would sit gripping my gloves. Should I run after him? Should I let him be? I pictured some great substructure shifting and creaking inside him. I felt my own jagged edges grinding together as they settled into new positions. At night, I often woke with a start and pressed my face against his damp, matted chest. Even his heartbeat seemed muffled and secret. I never was able to imagine what he dreamed.

I was moving around the kitchen one day in the spring of 1974, serving up breakfast to a man from the mourners’ bench.
Dr. Sisk. I was trying to hurry Jiggs along because it was nearly time for kindergarten and he was just sitting there with one sock on and nothing else. I was tripping over the dog, this terrible dog that Selinda had brought home from Girl Scouts. It wasn’t one of my quieter times, in other words. So it took me a minute to notice what I assumed to be Saul from another age, leaning in the doorway—the Saul I married, with a calmer face and no lines around his mouth, a little more hair on top, easier and looser and less preoccupied. He wore faded, tattered jeans and carried an Army surplus knapsack. He watched me with a kind of wry amusement that Saul had long ago lost. Well, I wasn’t so very surprised. In fact I’d already thought of an explanation for it (some simple time warp, nothing to get alarmed about) when he spoke. “I knocked but nobody answered,” he said.

It wasn’t Saul’s voice at all, and never had been; didn’t have that echo behind it. I said, “Amos!”

“How you doing, Charlotte?”

He straightened up and came to offer me his hand. By now I was so used to various people wandering in it didn’t occur to me to ask why he was here. (I’d been expecting him for years, to tell the truth. Wondered what was keeping him.) But Amos seemed to think he had to tell me. “Hear Clarion High School is looking for a music teacher,” he said. “I thought I might apply. I guess I should’ve dropped a line ahead of time but I’m not too much of a letter writer.”

He had sent us fifteen letters in all the time we’d been married—if you count a Hallmark wedding card and about fourteen of those printed change-of-address notices that you pick up free from the post office. But that’s the way the Emorys did things. I said, “Never mind, have some breakfast. Meet Jiggs and Dr. Sisk.”

Jiggs stood up in his one striped sock and shook hands. He was always a dignified child, even naked, and looked like a
kindly little old man in his stodgy glasses. I was proud to show him off. But Amos gave him a puzzled stare and said, “Jiggs?”

Then Dr. Sisk rose too, jarring the table, and leaned across the scrambled eggs to offer one freckled, webby hand. “Arthur Sisk,” he said. “From the mourners’ bench.”

“Mourners’ bench,” said Amos, still waiting.

“I was contemplating suicide. Preacher up and offered me an alternative solution.”

“Have some more eggs,” I told Dr. Sisk.

“No thank you, darlin’, maybe later,” he said. He turned back to Amos. “Life was getting me down. Grinding on so. The tedium! I’m a G.P. All those infants with upper respiratory infections, Vicks VapoRub smeared on their chests. Stethoscope goes ‘Sppk!’ when you pull it away. I thought of suicide.”

“Is that so,” said Amos.

“Preacher talked me out of it. Recommended I give my life to Christ, instead. Well, I liked the way he put it. I mean, just to hand my life
over
. Isn’t that true, my dear,” he said to me.

“Well,” I said, “but you still have income tax and license renewals.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Still have bank statements and dental appointments and erroneous bills,” I said. “If it were all that easy, don’t you think I’d long ago have handed
my
life over?”

Dr. Sisk sat down and started pulling at his nose.

“Help yourself to some eggs,” I told Amos.

“What?” Amos said. “Oh … no, really I …”

“Saul is paying a hospital visit, he ought to be back before long.”

“Well, do … I mean, funny, I thought it was a daughter you had,” Amos said. He took a handful of his hair. “Didn’t you send me a birth announcement? Daughter named Catherine.”

“Oh yes, that would be Selinda,” I said. “She’s already left for school.”

“Selinda.”

“This is Jiggs.”

“I see. Jiggs,” said Amos. He let go of his hair but continued looking confused.

Then Jiggs seemed to feel he had to stand up all over again, flashing white moons off his fingerprinted spectacles. “Jiggs,
please,”
I said. “In fifteen minutes you have to be ready to leave. Would you like some coffee, Amos?”

“No, thanks, I stopped for breakfast in Holgate.”

“Well, come and sit in the living room,” I said, and I led him down the hall, untying my apron as I went. “I hope you don’t mind the mess. It’s still a little early in the day.”

There
was
a mess, but nothing that would clear up as the day went on. Some guests can make you see these things. I had never realized, for instance, how very much dollhouse furniture Linus had produced in the last few years. People kept offering to buy it from him for fabulous amounts, but he wouldn’t sell. It was all for me, he said. Now on every tabletop there were other tables, two inches high. Also breakfronts, cupboards, and bureaus, as well as couches upholstered in velvet and dining room chairs with needlepoint seats. And each tiny surface bore its own accessories: lamps with toothpaste-cap shades, books made from snippets of magazine bindings, and single wooden beads containing arrangements of dried baby’s breath. Entire roomfuls were grouped beneath the desk and under the piano. I could see that Amos was startled. “They’re Linus’s,” I told him. “He makes them.”

“Oh
, yes,” said Amos. He sat down on the couch, letting his moccasins sprawl out across the rug. “How is Linus these days?”

“He’s fine.”

“No more of his … trouble?”

“Oh no, he seems very steady. Right now he’s over at the laundromat with Mama.”

“And is Julian in these parts?”

“He’s down at the shop already,” I said.

“What shop?”

“The radio shop.”

“Dad’s
radio shop?”

“Well, where have you been?” I asked. “Doesn’t Saul keep in touch?”

“At Christmas he just sends this card from the church,” said Amos, “telling me to bear in mind the true meaning.”

“Oh, I see,” I said. “Well, Julian works at the radio shop. It’s TV now, mostly, but we still
call
it the radio shop. He’s doing just fine. I really believe his lapses are going to get fewer.”

“Is that right,” said Amos. He drummed his fingers on his knapsack.

“Pretty soon we’ll start trusting him with money again, but meanwhile the customers just come by here and pay Miss Feather instead.”

“Miss …?”

“But what about you?” I asked. “Do you think you’ll get this job?”

“Oh, sure, the principal wrote and told me it’s mine if I want it. And I guess I do want it. I’ve been in one place too long; it’s time for a change. And I’d just broken off with this girl, felt ready to … though I’m not so certain that I could take Clarion again. I wish this offer had turned up someplace else.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Clarion,” I said. (I don’t know why.)

“No, of course not, it’s fine,” said Amos. “I didn’t mean it wasn’t.”

He hooked his thumbs in his belt and tipped his head back against the couch, closing the conversation. I remembered that
Amos used to be the Emory who ran away. Maybe he still was. Weaknesses came one to a person in that family, and could be conquered but not destroyed; they merely moved on to someone else. To Julian. Julian was collecting weaknesses like so many coins or postage stamps. Saul’s old trouble with girls was Julian’s now and so was Linus’s tendency to break down. We all loved Julian a lot, and no wonder. We were fond of his smudgy, weary eyes and exhausted good looks, and if he took on Amos’s habit of running away then we would be in trouble. I said, “Amos, do you still run away?”

He seemed to have been caught off-guard. “What?” he said. “Well, no, for heaven’s sake, why would you ask a thing like that? Of course not.”

“Where did it go?” I asked him.

“What?”

But before I could explain, in came Saul, stooping automatically in the doorway. He stopped. “Amos?” he said.

Amos stood up and said, “Hello, Saul.”

“We’ve waited a long time for you,” Saul told him, and set a hand on his shoulder. I was smiling as I watched, but what I wondered was: why did Amos look so much younger, when he was the oldest of the Emory boys?

Now they were complete, the four of them under one roof again. Amos’s job didn’t start till fall, so meanwhile he helped at the radio shop. Also, he got our old piano tuned and practiced every day. It never failed to amaze me that Amos had become a musician. Having barely scraped through school, he’d fallen into music like a duck finally hitting water and worked his way gladly through the Peabody Institute. Amos Emory! He sat hunched at the yellow-toothed piano playing Chopin, his moccasins set gingerly among the dollhouse furniture, elbows close to his sides as if he feared to damage the keys with his huge square hands. A rag of black hair fell over his
forehead. “This has got to be the worst piano I’ve ever come across,” he told me, but he continued pulling in its faded, tinny, long-ago notes.

Unfortunately, I don’t like piano. Something about it has always irritated me. But Mama loved to hear him; she’d been musical herself once, she said. And Selinda often paused on her way to someplace else and listened from the door. She was thirteen that summer and had suddenly turned beautiful. Her hair was blonder from the sun and she had these burnished, threadlike eyebrows and dusty freckles. And close behind her you’d generally find Jiggs, who came running from anywhere as soon as he heard music. He coaxed lessons from Amos and then practiced what he learned for hours at a time—plodding about on the keys, breathing through his mouth, fogging up his spectacles. Whenever I passed through the living room, I would smile at the back of his soft fair head and make my eternal, evil wish: Please let his mother drop dead somewhere, I’ll never hope for anything else in my life.